“Do what you love,” Garten said. “If you love it, you’ll be good at it.”

Long before she was a best-selling cookbook author and host of the Emmy Award-winning television show “Barefoot Contessa,” Garten worked at the White House in the 1970s on nuclear energy policy.

It was dreadfully boring, she said, and when she asked her husband what she should do, he suggested she pick something that would be fun.

She saw an ad for a small food store on sale in Westhampton Beach, New York, and made an offer, thinking she’d have time during the negotiation phase to decide if that was really what she wanted. But the owner accepted it the next day. Just like that, she’d bought a business.

“I had no experience,” Garten said. “I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d done in my life.”

She learned on the fly and gave it her all. “There were days when I was working until midnight,” she said, “but you want to do something you love doing.”